Food Triggers

Dear Migraineur readers,

I am curious - what do you think of the concept of food triggers?  I will prejudice the discussion by telling you what I think.  I think that people who have the occasional migraine (you know, once a month or less) certainly could have a food trigger.  For those of us who have several a week or more, I think it’s probably nonsense.  Or maybe it’s not total nonsense, maybe it’s just that folks who have frequent migraines have dozens of food triggers, so many that it’s effectively everything.  And, saying all foods trigger a migraine isn’t that much different from saying no foods trigger a migraine, if you see what I mean.  (A migraineur’s gotta eat something, after all.)

This is a bit of a sore spot for me, because there seems to be a pervasive notion out there that if we just keep our little food journals and review them carefully, we will magically realize, “Oh, I should definitely not have eaten that coconut cream pie!”  And then if we continue to eat the coconut cream pie, our migraines are our own fault!

Look, this is complex, like any issue of health and illness.  Now that our affluent society has conquered, or nearly conquered, most of the worst infectious illnesses, many the truly devastating diseases are lifestyle-related.  But many lifestyle-related diseases have a genetic underpinning; we are more susceptible to diabetes, or cancer, or heart disease because we have the parents we have.  Those genes are expressed in an environment, though, and if you don’t give the genes the environmental raw material they need– no expression.  So it does seem to me that there’s a certain way in which many kinds of illness kind of are our fault.  Sort of, in a limited way.  If you get what I’m saying.  I know that’s not a popular thing to say to people who are sick, and I know many of my readers come here to be consoled, not to be blamed.  And I sure as heck don’t want to be blaming people, any more that I want someone telling me that surely my migraines are caused by something I voluntarily did to myself.

This is why the food trigger issue still bugs me, if only because my experience eliminating the most common triggers was so disheartening.  I gave up red wine for 6 weeks - still got 3 migraines a month.  Gave up artificial sweeteners for several weeks - migraines galore.  Avoided MSG and all other sources of glutamate, including the hair conditioner the Red-Haired Boy likes - migrainey-migrainey-migrainey-boo!

So then I started thinking about less common food triggers - you know, some extra-special personal food trigger that is Mine and No One Else’s.  The problem with this is that I eat an extremely varied diet, and there is no one thing that I eat often enough for it to be a problem.  Seriously, I don’t even eat bread every day the way most people do.  After my success several years ago on a low-carb diet, I got out of the bread habit, and while I do consume bread now, it’s only a couple of times a week.

I’d love to find a food trigger, even it turned out to be my absolute most favoritest food in the whole wide world.  Because then it would be under my control.  But I’d hate to find a food trigger, even if it turned out to be something that I could easily give up.  Because then my migraines would be my own damn fault.